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June 16th, 2006
01:02 pm
There are no fish here.
The sleeping place of my only memory has been disturbed, and cannot I soothe it back.
My eye peers into a smooth speckled mass of suspended infinitesimals.
And the dark threads creep through the clear water slowly,
In silence and permeating all, going through the whole,
Those elongated, monstrous seconds, unenviable,
When you are your choice
When you know that what you have released will touch everything in time.
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01:01 pm - Split
A split in the skin is a language too direct.
For years
I measured the worth of a bruise
The impact of a cry,
And decided on a dark corsage I can’t unpin.
Desire shuffles through the mouth
Love in
Love out
Love for the ticking clinician juicing his light machine,
Love for flat edges and corrupted needs.
A split in the skin is a returned letter, torn open.
The seal was so tight I simply couldn’t
Breathe in
Breathe out
A slash to loosen the sash
A gash
A gash
Slick ladders in the ditch, sick matter.
A split in the skin is a razed horizon.
Bled of impurities, ribbon fine
Heart mutters, ‘Not again,’
Pulse up
Pulse down
Her cannibal glint is mine, is mine.
You won’t taste the reward of a red that rich.
A split in the skin is no place for a kiss.
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January 20th, 2006
02:46 pm - Historian
When I was younger, the sleeves would be purposefully arranged
So as to reveal a tiny piece of the whole deep wound.
Now I sit at twenty-two, bereft of a secret.
All my art, gone to white lines.
Pain doesn’t negotiate.
It issues demands.
It wears a small black mustache.
It ran my house like a well-lit brothel
With no nights off,
And the men howled like animals,
Relentless, drooling, the pin.
Orphaned body,
I claimed you, vandal,
Thief with a knife
I thrust your head into the cold air
And together we escaped,
Ashamed, but alive.
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10:29 am - Violins
In my own private theater of emotion,
Made all the more sinister by their numbers,
Oppressive
I could not listen to the orchestra
Without thinking of the violins as red organs
And the bows as saws
Pushing deeper and deeper into the sexual,
With malice.
The red curtains parted.
In all my brutal memory,
There exists no meaner image.
Love is a sore reflex.
It lies down, suffers sharp words,
Dismissals,
Cruel admonishments,
Slides closer to the elements,
Burnt, soft, full of dark marks.
It never forgets the original moment of its creation.
It accepts nothing else, like a stubborn child.
It knows and seeks its home in you,
No matter how faint the stars appear.
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November 22nd, 2005
03:44 pm - Last
Walking the perimeter of the city,
Our soles snagged by uneven pavement,
We talked of nothing but Other men,
The great grief, the strangers, and loveless erasures.
The knots of my spine, knuckle-tight,
Absorbed that first and final shock,
Of wood, nails, terror and need,
And my eyes, black as a years-long eclipse,
Stayed fixed in their loose fluid.
What was illuminated in that night?
As the lip of the bottle slid into me,
I saw, upside down, the road behind us.
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03:11 pm - slight
All day the pieces of our conversation have floated down like ashes.
I search for intelligible phrases.
Love.
You.
I miss.
They fall like cicadas of flame,
Hissing through the mutilated air.
My breath is the current on which they ride:
I speak, and your words, fragile scraps,
drift and scatter like discarded wings.
Notice this.
I am the love that you miss.
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November 15th, 2005
03:15 pm - preserves
she says i am:
1. at night she glows in the dark. bands of light slice across her skin from the blinds in her room. it is moonlight. magic light. not a harsh light. she is thumbalina. she is beautiful. she is fragile. she wears herself inside out. she is not afraid to do this. so much passion pushing at her seams. so easily held. mon petit cherie. her beauty is convlusive. she knows herself better than most people. i bring her fall boquets. dead leaves and twigs. her smell reminds me of truth and poetry and france. she reminds me that beauty is worth striving for. a subtle huntress. queen of cups. queen of wands. there is so much more to write about her. worth everything.
2.you remind me of anne sexton poems. particulary "her kind". instead of a song, i think of light and her voice smooth over rocks. deep and harsh. so full of emotion. but if i had to chose a song.....it would be an edif piaf song in french.....a love song.
3. Cassandra! (of course!)
4. a contained fire.
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October 17th, 2005
10:58 am - So much for gravity
You are:
A black thread trailing over red paper
The silt of pearls between my teeth
The cusp of pink in white on each finger
The guest of my great O
Co-author to an abraded love
Tuned to anthropomorphic frequencies
A melody composed in sleep
And Madness dances all around you.
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April 17th, 2005
11:38 pm - incomplete handspring
I have a lot of words in me today.
I am compelled by careening consonants
Shaped by a well-read tongue and melodic ear
Intoxicated with existence
And open to polyphony—
I am in love with a world of sounded ideas
Of amorous amative affectionate adjectives
And the moving circuitry of shared understanding—
I have a lot of words in me today.
Swirling around in the mind like a spinning drain.
And WOULD you know,
I must confess,
sometimes these snaky phrases begin to believe they
ARE me, and that I am nothing without them,
their mere and often inconvenient
vehicle for mystery!
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06:20 am - to you whom i love
i sit on your bed.
i know it as yours, and no one else's.
this annoints me into a state of conscious incoherence
so that the first and last of my senses scatter into dotted patterns, a ferocious thrill.
i know you shed dreams and cells there, in that unsteady construct, night after night--
and despite my best efforts, i cannot refrain from imagining what it would be to alter
the make-up of that sleepy cornice,
that momentary sweatshirted-weather god i want to devastating way of saying to me
of speaking into me, really
with a single subtle implicit touch
a brush against the arm, innocuous.
i read too much into things. far too much (youknowthewords),
and consequently every pulsebeat sustains the whole,
a dangerous condition.
i love!
hanging down like miniature ladders,
i'd climb those braided strings around your neck and burrrow deep in the soft reward.
you are the music that seeps in.
the insidious turn, the slow listen.
deliberate, tender.
everything rests on an impulse, on a risk, on the triumph or loss of the box i perform.
i cannot dig enough to greet the challenge you present, i am turned aside and left to regard my sharp marked shoulderblades without a chest to lean into.
i have a need.
yet i have no other way to satisfaction, but this.
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March 27th, 2005
11:27 pm - The Root of the Lotus
The Lotus adorns my room.
The face of the Lotus, anyway,
revered for its beauty and frightening resilience.
True enough,
its petals fan out like organized artillery.
But have you ever glimpsed its root?
Lop off the head of one such flower, and
a living anchor miles deep will draw from the powerful bottom of the forgotten
to push against the hovering hand of the world.
The Lotus I nearly held to my chest tears away over headstones without a cry.
It is no garden flower, my lotus, sighing to be plucked by some eager lover’s hand.
It watches, it pierces the deep and best of all, it floats.
As shadows curl to wisps, it gathers strength where you and I cannot see:
in the residue of everything unremembered,
a swamp,
a thick fishes brew.
Limbs open to the sky, it sacrifices the best of its beauty to the world.
Even so,
this lotus knows all about what keeps it afloat--- the steady mad traffic, the circulation of motes, of terrors, of deadly little things.
Our love, too, is a Lotus.
Capable of bending towards unreachable depths,
Pressing its wanting petals between two worlds.
Baring its points as a warning to all who would mistake it as vulnerable.
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11:26 pm - loveletter.
At certain moments, things open into the possibility of being. Pregnant with tension, soliciting a choice, a gesture, anything to acknowledge they exist.
And they close, these pockets of clear emotion, these threads of understanding and courage.
And so in writing I enter, and pass through this space, which is not an emptiness, before it’s smoothed over and sewn up without even a mark to remember it by.
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Until she wrote the letter, she treated his skin like paper, communicating through fingers her messages of care and desire. His body accessible in pieces and hinged on a moment, round as the space beneath a bridge. A thought of him passed over her like a hand, causing her to sit up in bed. To open her eyes and sift those curious beams through the dark.
She looked down at her body and her face shifted with the weight of new understanding. It was her skin: glowing, translucent as a Chinese umbrella, oily and fine. Gazing hard, suddenly she realized that her entire body was aglow, cutting through the room in pale beams, a generator. Fingerprints dusted her arms, face and neck, mapping their traces like smudges on pearl. They pulsed in color.
She opened her mouth to ask how and the whole room flooded with silvery threads, shooting their veins through the ceiling, bouncing from corners and smashing into one another in their haste to escape and be known. Particles partnered and separated in pale swirls. She opened her eyes wide and wider still until her irises turned the color of water, filled with reflections and strange lights. The room vibrated with warm heat and the bedposts tapped against the wall with growing force, insistent. Crackling, the electrical sockets sputtered and burst into small stars.
She swung down from the bed, nerves tingling, absorbing the emerging scene. Her mouth stood slightly open as the room began to vibrate in time with her quickened blood. She stretched her hands before her and desires flew from her cuticles like sound waves, like a comb curving through hair, an idea leaving its shape in matter. Her body held no weight, her veins like highways shone through her skin. She took a few steps, and the water in her vase bubbled and spilled over the rim like yellow champagne, the flower heads it held exploding into bloom. Her breath now came in rasps, short exhalations engraving themselves in shapes and strokes. She whirled around with force while her laughter broke on the air and splintered into smaller laughs, darting away and crashing down the window. There she stood, in the middle of it all, leaning on the balls of her feet, holding her whole self skyward.
Light emanated from her throat, and she collapsed, trembling, as millions of brilliant invisibles grazed her skin. She let her hands hang limp, fingers grazing her hips, incandescent, sharp. Without warning, she noticed some foreign thing pulsing beneath her shirt, pricking her flesh, calling for attention. She lifted the bulging fabric to expose her skin and drew a sharp breath.
Her head jolted up, eyes forward, transfixed. A panorama of scenes project from her stomach, shooting from her navel onto the hot walls, blown out, bright white. Overwhelmed, she receives a hazy image of herself dancing, barefoot in the mud, just for the occasion and satisfaction of moving her body in front of him. In a crowded room she sits beside him, wearing his glasses to see the world as he does. She moves atoms for him with spins, claps, jumps, motions of happiness, changing the quality of air. A little hummingbird vibrates beneath her ribs, she exhales feathers and with them writes of its struggle to keep warm.
She keeps her eyes trained on the scenes as they change. She notices how, in glances, she transmits her smallness, her curiosity, her density of feeling into his hands. The soundless movements reveal her secret desire to cover the lights in orange paper and gently lead him in. She presents him the biggest leaf she can find, her palm scorched with excitement and cold sweat. She invites him to see her exposed, angular as a gymnast, porous and sensitive to change as the tape he records his visions on....
And so she watched, barefaced and in smiles, flushing and waning like warm breath hitting cool air. Alone, at full volume, with muted figures cutting across her vision. A product of her own delicacy, of veins, eyelashes, precipitation. The exigency left her exhausted.
Beauty.
Someone who solicited so much emotion was worth the risk required to say so. She plunged her hands into phosphorescence. She would get down on all fours and take a piece of the world to rip it up and rearrange it as something more beautiful than it was.
The room vibrated and shook down its plaster.
The pages of her books began to curl, the print sliding off and dripping into shallow pools.
Little bubbles gathered and puckered the paint on the ceiling above where she stood.
She knows how the smallest things swell like tremendous joys, or bitter fruit.
She delighted in him. Her fists clenched as she closed her eyes and bit down on her bottom lip.
The room grew brighter and lighter until, like a paper ballerina, she became indistinguishable from the whiteness of that night.
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Everything returns to rest when the transaction is completed, the story read. Breath marks the skin and makes memories, thick as a whiteout. Everything matters, this gesture matters, should it go unspoken of or unrecognized and should it change nothing but how thoughts move, carried along on whispers or currents.
One cannot demand change. One can only expect to have done it, and in doing it pass through that rare opening in heart and time, blasting apart the ledge of wanting silence.
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11:22 pm - Recipe for a Dysfunctional Woman
Add one part poison. Two halves a teaspoon.
A snippet of ballerina tutu and just a tiny bit of unleavened dream.
Distilled Thought is essential (eliminates those nasty lumps in the throat)
and it’s best to leave the “No” out altogether.
Fingernail shards and freckle particles are suggested for maximum flavor.
Next,
prepare to Stir!
(This is where you agitate with force.)
Work that crank until it hurts.
You said you wanted to be a Creator--
so show this dish who its maker is!
Once pureed to indistinguishable bits,
let your ingredients incubate in an abandoned van,
or any unlocked vehicle one can reach by crawling.
Revisit your concoction; then devour.
Use three fingers.
Force down the lights and cower.
Now—and this step isn’t easy
to achieve
as it requires a capacity for belief---
concentrate hard, and project your project into a particular spot in your body.
Intestines, for example, work just fine.
The formula's so simple---Vision Plus Precision!
Remember:
you do not have a voice in this composition.
Regurgitate with vigor, and spread contents into any shape you like.
Bake for an adolescence.
Bread and batter your legs, and finally your heart, to complete.
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January 26th, 2005
03:51 am - disappointment
Goddammit!
I’m so angry and suddenly JESUS I’m crying, I’m sobbing and I realize I don’t know why– and the thought catches me, I repeat it once twice I know it’s something to dig for, to lower down to darkly, a persistence that signals the writer’s sentence: to tear the heart loose from its impatient corner
And there’s a vicious sadness in me, oh yes im raging inside, im so angry I could FUCK! but I still don’t know why SO angry--
sad is easier, the sadness of how frail you are the shame of how abruptly my blood recedes in mistrust the aggravated knowledge that we all fail each other in the most miserable ways
I know–--
maturation’s requisite,
we must.
But there’s more
I’m wild and the wildness is terror because I don’t want to know these things about you, these things that not now but one day will keep me from loving you
that will push me so far onto my own two feet that im standing alone
the bite of a love I can’t hold onto
the blank anguish of expecting so little from someone so close.
And here I sit, bewildered, like a child with a jigsaw map of North America spread before her face in all-the-wrong-order,
grieving and snarling at four empty walls.
Shhhhhh.
Outside I’m wailing but look closer, behind the glittering mashed up eye-holes.
I’ve got the lance up to my breast, the paint’s on my face
because I’ve been a blue woman standing in choppy water for too long.
It happens slowly, slowly, but oh when it does
the heart turns,
abject muscle, a lonesome knife.
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January 25th, 2005
09:14 pm - slice
so many things I wished of love---
I was caught in a one winged dream.
Entering into love a wisher elicits
tragic immobility and endless projection–but I didn’t know that before I met you.
I remember those moments of absolute beauty
vibrant image ringed in violet light, you, an apparition suffused by soft edges
delivered into a sensibility of being in touch with the amazing miracle ---we say life---
a precious piece of the all of the anythingispossible of the we inside me where I, amateur sorceress, apprentice of beauty, commanded the Gods:
“Love!” ‘yyyyyyyyyyes?’ "Introduce me to this glorious moment of redemption
I am a lover of communion floating thirty thousand miles beyond former conceptions of self I am ready to untie my head of knots and let this heart be more than muscle."
Here comes the secret undoing of a wonder of mind out of time, the loss of my wings, and the bruise of my yellow eye.
I approached unity with a knife by my side–
I wear scars on my sleeve as proof.
I remember (because I cannot forget)
those moments of ugliness
how razors slid from my mouth
how my love has not been perfect
how I vomited another’s name into cold ceramic in summer
how I panted in pain
how I made it your fault how I how I how I
how could I how could I not
I know how my intensity offends you.
I know how my love thrashes like a wild kite,
an inconstant motion, dependent on unseen currents.
I know how my loves crushes as it cares.
Only you know this certain truth:
that I am but a child, uncomprehending of her power
first zodiac sign baby waving fist
enamored with birds because they fly,
imitating wind because it delights in its spontaneity,
quivering like a fragile ghost beneath your thumb.
And so again and forever imperfect, as minds do, I skip ahead on stepping stones of information assimilated images
meeting you always and never
folded like a Chinese box inside a watchful restless rocking
gazing into the mirror
sobbing into the mattress
taunted by the impossible figure of another me I cannot be.
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